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This article addresses the issue of the different status that typology has in American linguistics as opposed to European linguistics. The historical roots of the difference lie in both structural and generative linguistics, in the contrasts between post-Bloomfieldian structuralism in the US vs. Praguean structuralism in Europe, and in the extent of the influence of generative grammar on the two continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reports on generative grammar in Europe. The extended standard theory of generative transformational grammar led a very diasporadic life in Europe in the mid seventies. There were a few pockets of linguists interested in this esoteric field, but most of them were young--students or assistants--and they were scattered and hardly aware of each other. The first two official conferences were again held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the very first one was not only again very successful but also very important in the development of the generative theory. The topic chosen for this discussed the question as to whether all transformational processes could be reduced to rules that obey certain domain restrictions such as the subjacency condition, or whether some rules had to be considered truly unbounded as was being proposed by writer Joan Bresnan and others. The papers read at the conference brought to light an astounding wealth of arguments based on material from a! great variety of languages. Virtually all of the evidence pointed in the direction of the view that all of syntax is subject to some locality principles. Thus it may be claimed, in fact, that this particular debate, one of the most heated ones around that time was in effect settled at this conference.